I
One of my friends had told me that if, during my travels in Algeria, I happened to be in the neighbourhood of Bordj-Ebbaba, I was to be sure to visit his old friend Auballe, who had settled down there.
These names had passed from my mind, and the settler was far from my thoughts, when by pure chance I came across him.
For a month I had been roaming afoot over that magnificent country which stretches from Algiers to Cherchell, Orleansville and Tiaret, a region both barren and wooded, its scenery both imposing and friendly. Between the mountains dense forests of pines clothe the narrow valleys through which the winter torrents rush. Enormous trees fallen across the ravine serve as bridges for the Arabs, and support a mass of creepers which twine around their dead trunks and deck them anew with life. In the secluded folds of the mountains there are dells awe-inspiring in their beauty, and streamlets whose level banks, covered with rosebay, delight the eye with their inconceivable charm.
But my sweetest memories of the journey are those of my afternoon walks along the shady roads over those undulating hills, from which one overlooks a vast russet-brown expanse of rolling country, stretching from the bluish sea to the mountain range of the Ouarsenis, crowned by the cedar forests of Teniet-el-Haad.
On the day I was speaking of, I had lost my way. I had just surmounted a crest from the top of which I could see, above a line of hills, the extensive plain of the Mitidja, and far in the background, on the summit of another range of mountains, almost invisible in the distance, that strange monument called the Christians’ Tomb, the burying-place, so they say, of a family of Mauritanian kings. I went down the other side, towards the South, while before me, stretching as far as the peaks upreared against the clear sky on the edge of the desert, there appeared a broken rocky country, tawny in colour as if all the hills were covered with lion skins sewn together. Here and there, higher than the rest, rose a yellowish, pointed hummock, like the hairy back of a camel.
I walked rapidly, lighthearted, as one feels when following the intricate windings of a mountain path. Life has no burdens during these vigorous tramps in the keen mountain air; body and soul, thoughts and cares alike, all cease to trouble. That day I was oblivious of all the cares that oppress and torture our lives, oblivious of everything but the joy of that descent. In the distance I discerned Arab encampments, brown pointed tents, clinging to the ground like shellfish to the rocks, or little cabins, mere huts made of branches, from which a grey smoke issued. White forms, men or women, wandered slowly about, and the bells of the herds sounded thinly in the evening air.
The strawberry-trees along my path drooped under their curious load, and spattered the road with their purple fruit. They looked like martyred trees from which a bloody sweat dripped, for at the end of each branch hung a red spot like a drop of blood.
The soil around them was covered with this scarlet rain, and the fruit trodden underfoot left gory stains on the ground. Now and again, springing upwards as I went along, I gathered some of the ripest and ate them.
Now all the valleys were filling with a white mist which rose slowly like the steam from a bull’s flanks, and above the mountains which rose on the horizon, bordering the Sahara, flamed a sunset like an illuminated missal. Long streaks of gold alternating with streaks of bloodred (more blood; the whole story of man is blood and gold!), while here and there, between the streaks, a narrow opening yielded a glimpse of a greenish-blue sky, far off as a dream.
Oh! how far I was from everything and everybody connected with a town-dweller’s life, even far from myself, a kind of wandering being, without consciousness or thought, merely seeing things as I went along and liking what I saw; far also from the road I had planned to follow and which I had forgotten about, for with the approach of night I realised that I was lost.
Darkness fell upon the land like a pall, and I could see nothing in front of me but the mountain looming in the distance. Seeing tents in a valley, I went down to them, and endeavoured to make the first Arab I met understand where I wanted to go. I cannot tell whether he guessed my meaning, but he replied at great length in a tongue of which I understood not a word. In despair, I had made up my mind to spend the night near the camp, wrapped in a rug, when amongst the strange words which came from his mouth, I thought I recognised the name of Bordj-Ebbaba.
“Bordj-Ebbaba?” I repeated, and he replied: “Yes, yes!”
I showed him two francs, a fortune to him, and he started off, I following him. Oh! for a long time in the darkness of the night, I followed this pale phantom who hurried barefooted before me over stony paths on which I continually stumbled.
Suddenly a light appeared. We came to the door of a white house, a kind of small fort, straight-walled and with no windows on the outside. I knocked, and the howling of dogs came from within. A Frenchman’s voice inquired: “Who is there?”
“Does M. Auballe live here?” I replied.
“Yes.”
The door opened, and I was face to face with M. Auballe himself, a tall, fair-haired fellow, down at heel, a pipe in his mouth, looking like a good-natured Hercules.
I introduced myself, and he held out both hands to me, saying: “Make yourself at home, sir.”
A quarter of an hour later I was dining exceedingly well opposite my host, who continued to smoke.
I knew his story. After having wasted a lot of money on women, he had invested all he had left in an Algerian estate, and had planted a vineyard. The vines were doing well; he was happy, and had the serene air of a contented man. I could not understand how this gay Parisian had been able to get used to this monotonous, solitary life, and I questioned him about it.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Nine years.”
“Don’t you get terrible fits of depression?”
“No, one gets reconciled to this country, and then ends by liking it. You would scarcely believe how it grips people by means of a host of trivial animal instincts that we are unconscious of in ourselves. At first we become attached to it by the subtle, inexplicable satisfaction of our senses. The air and the climate conquer our bodies, in spite of ourselves, and the cheerful sunlight which floods the country keeps the mind clear and peaceful without any trouble. Through our eyes it pours into us continuously, and you might truly say that it purges the darkest recesses of the soul.”
“And women?” I asked.
“Ah! one misses them a little.”
“Only a little?”
“My God! Yes—a little. For even amongst the tribes, one always finds accommodating natives who wish to copy European ways.”
He turned to the Arab who was waiting on me, a tall dark fellow with black eyes gleaming under his turban, and said:
“Leave us, Mohammed; I will call you when I want you.”
Then, turning to me, he explained:
“He understands French, and I am going to tell you a story in which he plays a great part.”
On Mohammed’s departure, he began:
“I had been here about four years, still very little at home in this country whose language I was only just beginning to stammer, and compelled from time to time to spend several days in Algiers to avoid breaking right away from the pleasures that had in the past caused my downfall.
“I had bought this farmhouse, a bordj, as they call it, an old fortified guard house, some hundreds of yards from the native encampment whose men I employ in my fields. From this tribe—a branch of the tribe of Ulad Taadja—I had chosen for my personal servant a strapping fellow, Mohammed ben Lam’har, whom you have just seen, and he soon became extremely devoted to me. As he did not like sleeping in a house that he was not accustomed to, he pitched his tent a few steps from the door, so that I could call him from my window.
“My life, well, you can guess it. All day I supervised the clearing and planting, I hunted a little, and dined with the officers of the neighbouring stations, or they came to dine with me.
“As for … amusements—you have heard about those. Algiers supplied all the very best; and now and again an accomodating and sympathetic Arab would stop me in the middle of a walk, to suggest that he should bring me home a native woman in the evening. Sometimes I accepted his offer, but more often I refused, thinking of the trouble that might follow.
“One evening in early summer, on returning from a tour of inspection around the fields, I wanted Mohammed, and entered his tent without calling, a thing I often did.
“On a big, red, woollen rug—one of those made by Jebel-Amour—thick and soft as a mattress, a woman was sleeping, a girl in fact, almost nude, with her arms crossed over her eyes. Her white body gleaming in the light admitted through the raised flap, seemed to me to be one of the most perfect specimens I had ever seen. Round here women are very beautiful, tall and uncommonly graceful in form and features.
“Somewhat confused, I dropped the flap of the tent and returned to the house.
“I am very fond of women. That lightning vision had pierced me through and through, kindling again in my blood the old, formidable ardour which had obliged me to leave France. It was a warm evening in July, and I spent nearly the whole night at the window, my eyes fixed on the dark shadow on the ground which was Mohammed’s tent.
“When he came into my room the next day, I looked him full in the face, and he lowered his head like a man who feels ashamed and guilty. Did he guess what I knew?
“I asked him bluntly: ‘So you are married, Mohammed?’
“I saw him blush, and he stammered:
“ ‘No, sir.’
“I made him speak French and as he had given me lessons in Arabic, the result was one of the most incoherent jumbles imaginable.
“ ‘Then why is there a woman under your roof?’ I retorted.
“ ‘She is from the South,’ he murmured.
“ ‘Ah! she is from the South. That does not tell me how she comes to be in your tent.’
“Without answering my question, he continued:
“ ‘She is very pretty.’
“ ‘Yes, indeed! Well, the next time you have a very pretty woman from the South to stay with you, please show her into my cabin and not into yours. Do you understand, Mohammed?’
“He replied very earnestly: ‘Yes, sir.’
“I must confess that during the whole day my feelings were dominated by the memory of that Arab girl lying on the red rug, and on my way back to dinner, I wanted to go into Mohammed’s tent again. In the evening he waited on me as usual, coming and going with impassive face, and I was often on the point of asking whether he was going to keep this very pretty Southern maiden for long under his camel-skin roof.
“About nine o’clock, still haunted by the lure of the female, which is as tenacious as the hunting instinct in dogs, I went out for a breath of air, taking a short walk in the direction of the brown canvas tent, through which I could see the bright flame of a lamp. Then I wandered further away, lest Mohammed should find me near his quarters.
“On returning an hour later, I saw clearly his characteristic profile in silhouette on the tent. Then, taking my key from my pocket, I made my way into the bordj where there slept, as I did, my steward, two French labourers and an old cook brought from Algiers.
“I went upstairs and was surprised to notice a streak of light under my door. I opened it, and saw facing me, seated on a wicker chair beside the table on which a candle was burning, a girl with the face of a statue, quietly waiting for me, and wearing all the silver trinkets which the women of the South wear on legs and arms, on the throat and even on the stomach. Her eyes, dilated by the use of kohl, were looking at me; her forehead, her cheeks and her chin were studded with four little blue marks delicately tattooed on the skin. Her arms, loaded with bangles, rested on her thighs, which were covered by a kind of red silk jibbah which hung from her shoulders.
“Seeing me come in, she stood upright before me, covered with her barbarous jewellery, in an attitude of proud submission.
“ ‘What are you doing here?’ I said to her in Arabic.
“ ‘I am here because I was told to come.’
“ ‘Who told you to come?’
“ ‘Mohammed.’
“ ‘All right. Sit down.’
“She sat down and lowered her eyes, while I stood looking at her.
“She had an unusual face: with regular, refined features with a slightly animal expression, but mystical like that of a Buddha. Her thick lips, coloured with a kind of reddish bloom which was also apparent elsewhere on her skin, pointed to a slight mixture of Negro blood, although her hands and arms were irreproachably white.
“Perplexed, tempted and embarrassed, I felt doubtful as to what I ought to do. In order to gain time, and to give myself an opportunity to consider the problem, I asked further questions about her origin, her arrival in this country and her connection with Mohammed. But she only answered those which least interested me, and I found it impossible to ascertain why or when she had come, with what object, on whose orders, or what had taken place between her and my servant.
“Just as I was going to tell her to return to Mohammed’s tent, she apparently anticipated my words, suddenly drew herself up, and raising her bare arms, while the tinkling bracelets slid in a mass towards her shoulders, she clasped her hands behind my neck and drew me towards her with an air of entreaty and irresistible wilfulness.
“Her eyes, burning with the desire to bewitch, with that need of conquest that imparts a feline fascination to the immodest gaze of a woman, appealed to me, captivated me, robbed me of all power of resistance, and roused me to an impetuous passion. It was a short, silent and violent struggle carried on through the medium of the eyes alone, the eternal struggle between the primitive man and woman, in which man is always conquered.
“Her hands behind my head drew me, with slow, increasing irresistible pressure, towards her smiling red lips, to which I suddenly pressed mine, holding her close to me, while the silver bangles, from her throat to her feet, jingled under the pressure.
“She was as wiry, supple and healthy as an animal, with the tricks and movements, the grace and even the scent of a gazelle, which gave her kisses a rare indescribable flavour, as foreign to my senses as a taste of some tropical fruit.
“After a while … I say after a while, it was perhaps as dawn was breaking, I decided to send her away, thinking that she would go just as she had come. I had not yet considered what I would do with her, or what she would do with me. But as soon as she understood my intention, she murmured:
“ ‘If you send me away, where would you have me go? I will have to sleep out of doors, in the dark. Let me sleep on the carpet at the foot of your bed.’
“What could I say? What could I do? I reflected that Mohammed, in his turn, was doubtless watching the lighted window of my room, and all kinds of problems, which had not occurred to me in the embarrassment of the first few moments, now confronted me.
“ ‘Stay here,’ I said; ‘We must talk it over.’
“My decision was made almost immediately. Since this girl had been thrown into my arms, I would keep her as a kind of slave mistress, hidden in my house, like the women of the harems. When she no longer pleased me, it would always be easy to get rid of her somehow, for in Africa these creatures belong to us almost body and soul.
“ ‘I will be kind to you,’ I said, ‘I will treat you well, but I want to know who you are, and where you come from.’
“She understood that she had to tell me something, and related her story to me, or rather a story, for she was probably lying from beginning to end, as Arabs invariably do, with or without a motive.
“The habit of lying is one of the most surprising and incomprehensible features of the native character. These people who are so steeped in Islamism that it forms a part of them, governs their instincts, modifies their racial characteristics and differentiates them from others in mental outlook as much as the colour of the skin differentiates the Negro from the white man, are liars to the backbone, to such an extent that one can never believe what they say. Do they owe it to their religion? I cannot say. One must have lived among them to understand to what a degree falsehood forms a part of their whole existence and becomes a kind of second nature, a necessity of life.
“She told me, then, that she was a daughter of a Caid of Ouled Sidi Cheik and of a woman captured by him in a raid on the Touaregs. This woman must have been a black slave, or at least the offspring of an earlier mixture of Arab and Negro blood. It is well known that Negresses are highly prized in harems, where they play the part of aphrodisiacs.
“Nothing of this origin was evident except in the purplish colour of her lips and the dark flush on her long supple breasts. The rest belonged to the beautiful Southern race, white and slender, her features as simple and regular as the head of an Indian image, a likeness which was enhanced by her wide-set eyes.
“Of her real life I could get no real information. She described it to me in disconnected trifles which seemed to pour haphazard from a confused memory, mingled with delightfully childish remarks. It was like a picture of nomadic life from the brain of a squirrel leaping from tent to tent, from camp to camp and from tribe to tribe.
“All this was narrated with the serious air which this strange race always preserves, with the expression of an idol descending to gossip, and with a rather comical gravity.
“When she had finished, I realized that I had absorbed nothing of her long story, full of trifling incidents stored up in her nimble brain, and I wondered whether she had not been merely playing with me in this meaningless and serious gossip, which left me no wiser than before about her or any event in her life.
“I reflected on this conquered race in the midst of whom we settle, or rather, who settle in the midst of us, whose language we are beginning to speak, whose everyday life we see going on under the flimsy canvas of their tents, on whom we impose our laws, our regulations and our customs, and of whom we know nothing. All this, mark you, goes on as though we were not there, as though we had not been watching little else for nearly sixty years. We no more know what happens under that hut made of branches or under that little cone of cloth anchored to the ground with stakes, than we know what the so-called civilised Arabs in the Moorish houses in Algiers are doing or thinking. Behind the whitewashed walls of their dwellings in the city, behind the leafy screens of their huts or behind the brown curtain of camel skin flapping in the wind, they live on our thresholds unknown, mysterious, sly and untrustworthy, smiling and impenetrable in their submission. Believe me, when I look at the neighbouring encampment from a distance through my field glasses, I find that they have superstitions, ceremonies and innumerable customs still unknown and not even suspected by us! Never, perhaps, has a race conquered by force been able to escape so completely from any effective domination, moral influence or persistent but useless inquiry on the part of their conquerors.
“I suddenly felt, as never before, that secret and impassable barrier which nature has mysteriously erected between the races, raised between me and that Arab girl who had just offered herself to me.
“Thinking of it for the first time, I asked her:
“ ‘What is your name?’
“She had been silent for some minutes, and I saw her start involuntarily as if she had forgotten that I was there. Then I saw in her eyes that the short interval had been sufficient for sleep to claim her, a sudden irresistible slumber, almost overwhelming, like everything that seizes the changing fancies of women.
“She replied dully, stifling a yawn: ‘Allouma.’
“ ‘You want to go to sleep?’ I continued.
“ ‘Yes,’ she replied.
“ ‘Very well, then, sleep,’ I said.
“She quietly stretched herself by my side, lying face down, her forehead resting on her crossed arms, and I felt almost at once that her primitive, fugitive thoughts had vanished in sleep.
“As for me, lying near her, I began to wonder why Mohammed had given her to me. Had he played the part of the generous and self-sacrificing servant who gives up the woman he had taken for himself, or had he acted on an idea more complex and practical in thus giving up to me this girl who had taken my fancy? An Arab, where women are concerned, has the most rigorous standards coupled with the most inexplicable tolerance, and one can understand his stern yet easygoing morality no better than his other feelings. Perhaps in my chance entry into his tent I had forestalled the kindly intentions of this thoughtful servant who had intended for me this woman, his friend, perhaps even his mistress.
“Tormented by all these possibilities, I became so tired that, in my turn, I gradually fell into a deep slumber.
“The creaking of my door aroused me; Mohammed was coming in to wake me as he did every morning. He opened the window, through which poured a flood of daylight, lighting up the figure of Allouma still asleep on the bed; then he gathered up my trousers, waistcoat and jacket from the floor in order to brush them. He did not look at the woman lying by my side, he did not even appear to notice that she was there, and his gravity, his demeanour and his expression were the same as usual. But the light and movement, the slight patter of the man’s bare feet, and the feeling of the fresh air on her skin and in her lungs roused Allouma from her torpor. She stretched her arms, turned over and opened her eyes, looked at me and at Mohammed with the same indifference, and sat up. Then she murmured:
“ ‘I am hungry now.’
“ ‘What will you have to eat?’ I inquired.
“ ‘Kahoua.’
“ ‘Coffee with bread and butter?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“Mohammed, standing near our bed, my clothes over his arm, waited for orders.
“ ‘Bring something to eat for Allouma and myself,’ I told him, and he went out without the least trace of astonishment or annoyance on his face.
“When he had gone, I asked the young Arab girl:
“ ‘Do you wish to live in my house?’
“ ‘Yes, I am willing.’
“ ‘I will give you a room for yourself, and a woman to wait on you.’
“ ‘You are generous, and I am grateful for it.’
“ ‘But if you do not behave yourself, I will send you away from here.’
“ ‘I will do anything you want of me.’
“She took my hand and kissed it, in token of submission.
“Mohammed returned, bringing a tray with breakfast.
“ ‘Allouma is going to live in the house,’ I told him. ‘Spread some rugs in the room at the end of the passage, and send for the wife of Abd-el-Kaderel-Hadara to come and wait on her.’
“ ‘Yes, sir.’
“That was all he said.
“An hour later, my beautiful Arab girl was installed in a large, well-lighted room; and when I came to see that everything was right, she entreated me to give her a wardrobe with a mirror on the door. I promised and left her squatting on a rug made in Jebel-Amour, a cigarette in her mouth, and gossiping with the old Arab woman whom I had engaged, as if they had known each other all their lives.